


Catching Fire

by uglowian



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, MCR - Fandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Alternate Universe, Angst, Id Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-25
Updated: 2013-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-06 03:28:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1101846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uglowian/pseuds/uglowian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>an alternate universe full of American wastelands and human trafficking. Pete Wentz, unfortunately, knows about the slave trade--and Gerard needs his help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catching Fire

**Author's Note:**

> originally coauthored as a chatfic with subcutis. curated by me.
> 
> warnings for: language, angst, references to non-consensual sexual situations, sex involving dubious consent, and discussions of human slavery

The frantic knocking jolts him from his sleep on the fringes of a smoggy dawn. A _rap rap rap_ that doesn’t stop until Pete stumbles off his cot, kicking his sheets into a limp pile, and staggers to the door. Jerks it open. Not wide, to be sure—not even very much. Just enough to see who’s there, to see what fucker wants to disturb his sleep when it’s already so very void of any state of peace.

The figure just beyond the threshold—well. He’s got red-ringed eyes and a nervous tightness to his posture, like some abused thing afraid to venture out of the shadows. In essence? No different from the rest of the human detritus shambling through the city formerly known as Los Angeles.

He blinks at Pete in the heatless glare of the hallway lights. One fluorescent tube blinkers in and out of luminosity and its castoff yellow light only serves to make the guy look more like some strange changeling, gaunt and wide-eyed.

“You’re Pete?”

Pete keeps one hand firmly on the doorknob and narrows his eyes. “Who’s asking?”

“Sorry—sorry—” he stumbles over his own breath. “I. I’m Gerard and I just—they told me you could help me.”

.

Gerard has a brother.

Pete thinks it’s ridiculous (and outright fucking stupid) that the guy still refers to his siblinghood in the present tense. Mikey vanished six years ago, presumably at the hands of the slavers. Pete says ‘presumably’ because Gerard didn’t see anything happen. ‘Presumably’ because Gerard obstinately clings to the hope that Mikey’s alive. That the vast absence in his life won’t be so vast or so absent forever. That his little brother’s corpse isn’t rotting in a gutter somewhere.

Because Gerard has this idea that life—any life—is better than death.

Pete knows otherwise. Pete lived that ‘any life’ and he _knows_. If Gerard finds the thing he once called Mikey, and if that thing is still alive, it won’t be the person he lost six years ago. No one comes out of the slave trade whole.

Gerard had a brother.

He doesn’t anymore.

.

He sits at the table—a sticky little thing with foldable legs and mildew spots in one corner—and stares as Gerard explains who he is, why he’s here. The dawn stretches its pale fingers across the floor, wisps of light dimmed by the grime on the window that Pete never opens or washes. And in the tiny space of this rundown apartment (in this little corner of an indifferent world), Pete slowly pieces together what it is Gerard’s asking.

A brother lost. Six years gone and, from the look of it, Gerard has spent all that time running himself into the ground. Trying to find the irretrievable. Pete wonders if he genuinely thinks he’s going to save Mikey (wonders if anyone could be that deluded), or if this is just some kind of penance. A desperate, haphazard attempt at absolution.

Both, he decides, are bullshit endeavors.

He looks at the photograph that Gerard put on the table—pushed towards him like some kind of offering, mumbling _They told me you survived…_ and _They told me you escaped…_ (like that somehow meant Pete could do something).

Pete hasn’t touched the picture. It’s creased and faded and warped in one corner, bloated with water damage. The swelling and contracting of dislocated reagent. Figured in the photo: a boy, unsmiling, or smiling very little at least, his features nearly lost to the washed out passage of time. Pale and faded, he remains like a ghost against the background of a vast and dimming sky, regarding the camera with mild disinterest.

“Why me?” Pete asks, even though that’s hardly the most pertinent topic. “What do you think I can do?”

Gerard drops his gaze to the dry and pitted floorboards. Chews absently on a ragged thumbnail.

“They said—you’d be the best to talk to. They said you’d know where to start, at least.”

Pete wonders who ‘they’ are and then decides he doesn’t care.

“Well, I don’t know. And anyone who thinks that _being_ a slave equates to knowing shit about the slave trade is a jackass.” He pushes the picture back to Gerard. “The only thing I know is that he’s gone. And even if I thought you could find him, I can’t help you.”

There’s a long, loud silence during which Gerard doesn’t move, doesn’t touch the picture. Just shakes his head, once, as if that will somehow dispel the truth. Belatedly, Pete shrugs and mutters ‘sorry’, even though he isn’t. This is the reality and it’s ugly—as far as he’s concerned, a person can learn to live with it, or they can suffocate themselves in whatever delusions they have about the persistence of the human spirit or some shit. He doesn’t care.

Standing, he says _I’ll walk you out_ , because Gerard is clearly incapable of taking a hint. He starts to move when cool and calloused fingers curl around his wrist. Hold him in place. It takes everything in him to suppress the urge to rip away, to not lash out at the uninvited contact. Instead, he looks at this man who has the audacity to touch him as though it’s meaningless. He looks, eyes hot, and snarls:

“Let go of me.”

Gerard recoils like it’s only now occurring to him that grabbing a stranger might constitute an invasion of space. He meets Pete’s gaze, though, eyes wide and imploring. Against the brimming glow of the colorless dawn, he looks as washed out as the photograph, as likely to vanish into the realm of the forgotten as his lost little brother.

“Please,” he whispers. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean…” His eyes are bright. “I can’t do it alone anymore.”

We’re all alone, Pete thinks, suddenly feeling very hollow. We’re all alone and nothing’s going to change that.

And yet, in spite of this apparent and unchangeable truth, he doesn’t look away. In spite of it, he holds Gerard’s fevered gaze and says _Okay—I. Okay._ and he doesn’t know why.

.

“I don’t really know how to help you, alright? I wasn’t dicking around when I said that.”

“Okay.” A pause. “So…what, then?”

“I know some people who might know what to do.”

“Okay.”

“They’re far away though. Like, other side of the country.”

“Okay.”

“Do you say anything besides ‘okay’?”

“Do you want me to?”

“No, I just—no. Forget it. Let’s go.”

.

A hijacked car and a trunk full of the necessary supplies. Food and water. Cartons of gas. A flashlight and a tarp and a roll of moth eaten blankets. The distance between them and the city stretches out on miles of paved asphalt; highways long deserted save for the litter, the debris, and the tumbleweed trash. This is how their story unfolds: on the reaches of empty roadways, chasing after something they’re never going to find. Driving in shifts and sleeping in turns.

Pete knows the drill. He’s done it all and then some in the life he led getting out here (running as far as he could from the life he’d been forced into). The means to stay alive in a dead country are simple. Keep moving. Stay alert. Don’t stop for anyone. Don’t stop until you reach the next hovel of a town, the next slow-decaying city with its strange menagerie of denizens. Bastions of safety that, when all’s said and done, really aren’t that safe.

The days drift by, saturated in sunlight. An enormous landscape rushes past them, quiet beneath a feathered sky. A particular state of silence. Ramshackle houses by the roadway now and again, crumbling and abandoned. Sagging roofs and ivy-dark windows. Buckling sideboards, empty doorways. The fading remains of an era long gone. Pete remembers hearing about it only vaguely; a dream or a life lived by someone else. A story imparted to him about a place now void of meaning.

From time to time, when the main roads become impassable, they take old and winding streets through deserted backlands. Occasionally they pass piles of fresh waste, stinking refuse at the side of the road. The abandoned traces of the nomadic caravans that roam the land. Safety in numbers, Pete supposes. Patched-together communities, bound by necessity rather than blood—some small defense against the slavers, the raiders, the aimless drifters with nothing to lose.

Pete glances at Gerard, slouched in the passenger seat, watching the ragged peaks of the mountains reach towards the sky. He chews his thumbnail—a habit, apparently—and looks sunken and drawn. They have little enough to say to each other and so they speak infrequently.

In the silence, Pete wonders at Gerard’s apparent total trust in him. Wonders what kind of defunct sense of self-preservation would allow him to put his life in another person’s hands. At length, Pete realizes that, perhaps, it isn’t trust after all, but desperation.

.

When Gerard does talk, it’s always about Mikey. The unsolicited sharing of recollection, like giving voice to his memory will somehow keep the kid alive.

Mostly, it’s fucking annoying.

Pete doesn’t have any interest in Gerard’s long-gone boyhood, in his saccharine memories of his dead brother—Jesus Christ.

After the sixth, twentieth, seventieth time, after the umpteenth _when we were kids_ , Pete snaps.

“Is it like, physically impossible for you to give it a rest or what?”

Gerard halts mid-sentence. Closes his mouth, lips compressed. His fucking compliancy is just as irritating as his bizarre need to overshare all the minutiae of his personal history. Pete bristles.

“Look,” he snarls, “Maybe I gave you the wrong idea when I agreed to this. Maybe you just don’t get it—I don’t know. But if your brother’s alive—and that’s a big fucking if—he’s not going to be like you remember, okay? You’ll be lucky if you recognize him at all. So stop wallowing in the past; it won’t do you, or him, any fucking good.”

There follows, after this, a tense silence. Gerard stares straight ahead, his mouth a thin line. After awhile, he says, in a hoarse whisper:

“He’ll be okay.”

Pete makes a derisive noise. “You tell yourself that.”

“He will. I know him—”

“You _know_? Grow up, Way. You don’t know shit. You think there’s something essential they can’t take from him? You’re wrong. I’ve seen it, all right? They take whatever they want and you can’t do a damn thing about it because they _own you_.” Pete can feel a slow-spreading heat diffuse through his gut. “Just—shut up already, okay? One of us has been through this and it wasn’t you. So trust me when I say that I’m not fucking kidding: they’ll do whatever they have to do to break him. Provided someone hasn’t killed him yet.”

Gerard’s hands have balled into fists. Clenching at nothing, resting white-knuckled on his thighs.

“If you’re so sure this is a lost cause, why are you helping me?”

Pete exhales through his nose. “I don’t fucking know.”

.

The miles unwind behind them. They cross through the Rockies and emerge on the other side to stretches of great plains and farmlands long untended. They scavenge for gasoline at empty, dust-covered stations. Siphon it from abandoned cars, broken down. It feels like an exercise in futility, bottom-feeding on the remains of civilization in hope of nothing at all.

“How do you know these guys?” Gerard asks as they leave another empty town and its empty cars and empty houses to be swallowed up by twilight.

Pete’s riding shotgun, this time. “What guys?” he asks, just because he feels like being ornery.

Of course, Gerard’s patience knows no bounds. “The ones we’re going to see. Who might be able to help us.”

“Travie and Ray,” Pete says, flatly.

“Yeah. How do you know them?”

Pete shrugs a little and watches the eastern sky sink into darkness ahead of them. “They run a…safehouse, I guess. For escaped slaves.”

“Oh.”

The quiet that follows all but crackles with some thought that Gerard isn’t sharing. Pete feels like he’s holding his breath, waiting for something. After two minutes of bloated silence, he says:

“Jesus Christ, Way, what is it?”

“What is…what?”

“Don’t be a jackass. Spit it out or don’t, but don’t sit there being all—I don’t know what, about it.”

Gerard chews the inside of his cheek. “It’s nothing. I just. I don’t want to—like. Intrude.”

“You did that already, actually. It’s called tracking me down and begging for help.”

He watches Gerard’s mouth wrinkle, slightly. The smallest frown. Gerard shrinks in on himself a little and really, fuck, it’s almost like he’s _trying_ to make his existence as abjectly pathetic as possible.

Pete huffs out a breath.

“Would you just say it already?”

“Okay.” Gerard very pointedly does not look at him. “Um—how did you…get away?”

“Long story.”

“But these guys—what? Helped you?”

“Yeah.”

“And they might know where to look for Mikey?”

“Maybe.”

“What will they—”

“I don’t know,” Pete snaps. “I said _maybe_. I don’t know what they’ll know, if they know anything at all.”

As it seems with all their conversations, Gerard recedes into silence. The night falls deep around them, moonless and impenetrable. Head tipped against the window, Pete drifts off into a sleep that brings with it no real rest, but rather, senseless dreams and the overwhelming weight of anxiety that follows him back into waking.

.

Pete loses count of the days they’ve spent traveling when the storm hits. They’re on a flat highway cutting through broad swathes of flat fields when the sound of thunder rolls across the sky. An enormous, shattering _crack_ —and the sky opens up. Rain spills down in torrents so fierce that, after a minute or two, he realizes they can’t keep driving, can’t even see ten feet ahead on the craggy asphalt.

And he pulls the car to the side of the road, and the rain drums down around them. Clatters on the roof and on the windshield, raucous. A rustling sound and then a creaking. Gerard leans past him, reaches for the duffle in the back seat and gropes for a can of peaches. His hands aren’t particularly large or long or remarkable, but there is a focused precision to how he handles the can opener. How he picks through peaches, fishing smooth orange arcs out of the syrup.

Pete watches him and the slow way he eats—like he isn’t very hungry, like this action is perfunctory—and is overcome with sense that, really, he has never seen Gerard in completion. There’s some aspect of him that’s missing, some part of him that should be vibrant, but isn’t.

“You want some?” Gerard asks, after a while.

Pete blinks. “What?”

A gesture with the can. “There’s just the juice left—I’ve seen you drink it before and I thought…”

Pete stares for long enough that Gerard shrinks away, tucking the can back to himself. Dropping his eyes to his lap.

“I mean. You don’t have to,” he says. “I just figured…”

“I’ll have it,” Pete blurts.

Gerard looks at him. A beat of silence, punctuated only by the drumming rain. And then—

He holds out the can. The aluminum glints weirdly, catching the strange, diffuse light of the storm. Pete looks at it, at the almost-clear liquid within, and pressure swells in his chest and oppresses his breathing just enough. But before a long-conditioned instinct can drive him to undo it all, he reaches out. Takes the can.

Gerard’s sticky fingers brush his in the handing-off. The juice is thick and sweet and moves slowly over Pete’s tongue. Down his throat. Saccharine. The smell of it reminds him of summers he couldn’t have possibly lived.

“Thanks,” he says, the taste of peaches lingering on his lips.

Gerard shrugs and the rain feels like a tremendous exhale all around them.

.

“We’re stopping here?”

They’re on the edges of a fading day. Pete brings the car to a halt in the deserted gravel drive of an abandoned church that stands like a lone sentry in the middle of a crumbling and empty town. Gerard squints out the window at the unmoving landscape cast in long stretches of orange.

Pete answers him: “You’re quick.” And climbs out of the car.

The keys jangle—a quiet clinking sound—as he opens the back door and reaches for one of the duffles. Gerard follows suit on the other side of the car. A long _swish_ , fabric dragged over upholstering.

Their footsteps crunch across the drive, out of synch, and Pete reaches the door of the church first. Kicks at the rotting handle until the lock gives and the door swings in on squealing hinges. Inside: a dimness disturbed only by long clouds of dust that glint like nebulae in the shafts of late-day sunlight spilling through the windows.

Pete steps over the threshold.

“You coming?”

Gerard hasn’t followed. Has, instead, lingered on the entrance steps, his gaze trained on the nearby yard. A cemetery stitched in by a collapsing fence. Overgrown grass and rows and rows of headstones.

“Gerard,” Pete prompts.

Gerard looks at him and blinks. A quiet _oh_ and then he steps inside. The door groans when he swings it shut behind him.

Together, they walk the length of the nave. Their footsteps echo in the space and against the high ceilings. On either side of them, vacant pews, all facing the direction of a dark and empty altar. Pete shifts his duffle from one shoulder to the other as they walk along the aisles. Explore and find nothing.

There is a staircase back by the entrance that leads to a deserted upper-tier. An untouched organ and yellowing leaves of sheet music. A walkway. Pete follows it, one hand on the dusty railing. Rough wood and peeling paint beneath his palm. He glances down at the pews, rapidly filling with shadow, and he walks on. Behind him, the rhythmic sound of Gerard’s footfalls.

The walk leads them to an open doorway. Beyond it, a narrow hall and a series of three rooms, all enveloped in darkness. Pete shifts his duffle around, digs inside until he finds their flashlight. Its pale beam illuminates a washroom, a bedroom, and a kitchenette in turn. Pete leads the way. The washroom, a small square, tiled white, everything clean but for the dust. Pete catches a glimpse of himself reflected in the modest rectangle of silvered glass hanging over the porcelain sink. His face thrown into weird and sharp relief by the long light of the flashlight.

He moves on.

Gerard at his heels, they explore the kitchenette. A tin of instant coffee by an empty pot on the counter. A stainless steel sink and a gas stove that _whuffs_ to life when Pete twists a dial. He blinks in surprise and then turns the coil off, the blue flame extinguishing.

A dead refrigerator opens and unleashes a foul breath. Rotting fruit, an eroded carton of curdled milk. A festering plate of—something. Food, once. Pete gags and swings the door shut. In the cabinets: a small assortment of dishes and glassware, neatly stacked. A desiccated loaf of bread. And four untouched cans of soup. They tuck them into their duffles. The cabinet doors close with a gentle _thump_.

The bedroom is austerely furnished. The overhead lights don’t work, but the lamp on the minimalist night-table flickers to life when Gerard tries it—another surprise. Pete flicks off the flashlight and surveys the room. A neatly made bed tucked against the opposite wall. An unadorned dresser in the corner. Pale walls and a wooden floor. A black crucifix hangs a few feet over the head of the bed. And on the nightstand, an open notebook lays beside the lamp. Small lines of neat text and a sentence unfinished.

There is nothing else.

Pete sets his duffle down. “I think we’re safe here.”

Gerard glances back out to the short, dark hallway, but doesn’t protest.

“You sleep first,” is all he says before picking up Pete’s bag and setting both duffles in the corner by the dresser.

He looks tired, his face more drawn than usual. His cheekbones pronounced, or maybe the hollows of his cheeks sunken in. And yet he crouches down, sits by the foot of the bed, and watches the door. Duty or loyalty—it’s hard to tell. A strange selflessness that seems, to Pete, to be so counterintuitive.

“You always do that,” he says, not moving towards the bed.

Gerard looks up at him. “Do what?”

“That—self-sacrificing shit. You never take anything for yourself.”

Gerard shrugs and drops his gaze. “You look tired.”

“You’re tired.”

“I’m fine.”

Pete makes a frustrated noise. “You’re doing it again.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“You’d let me walk all over you if I wanted to.”

“Pete—” Gerard sighs, a heavy, fatigued sound, like Pete’s exhausting him or something. “Just rest. I’m not trying to have an argument.”

“You’re _never_ trying to have an argument,” Pete snaps. “That’s the point. You just give up. Every time.”

“Okay.”

His compliance is maddening. It’s like pushing against a hanging sheet; something’s there, but it won’t resist. And, perhaps compelled by some morose curiosity, Pete pushes harder. Tries to cut deeper in hopes of hitting something solid.

“Okay?” he repeats. “You agree that you never fucking stand up for yourself?”

“I was trying to be nice—”

“Why?” Pete asks, unable to comprehend. Kindness without motive is so alien. “What do you want?”

Gerard just shakes his head and glares in the general direction of their duffle bags. Pete blows out an aggravated breath.

“You know,” he says, voice low, “if your brother is as gutless as you, there’s no way he’s still alive.”

He says it just to hurt—just because he can. He doesn’t know why he’s looking for a fight all of a sudden, only knows that he wants something lain out in front of him. Fighting back or broken beyond repair, but nothing in between.

And so, it gratifies Pete only slightly to see Gerard flinch. To watch him fold his arms around himself as if to gesture some haphazard attempt at self-defense.

“Don’t,” he breathes out, shaky. “ _Don’t_ talk about Mikey.”

“Why? So you don’t have to think about it? I promise you this, Way: when you find him— _if_ you find him—you won’t think about anything else. You’ll see him and you’ll see everyone who’s ever touched him, ever made him cry, everyone who’s ever laid him out and—”

“I love him,” Gerard blurts, twisting to look at Pete again. His eyes are brimming and bright behind his dark fall of hair

His chest heaves and the words hang between them, electric. Almost tangible. It’s a weird non sequitur; not exactly a defense against Pete’s jabs, but there it is. Unmitigated. And it’s hardly the first time Gerard has ever professed his more-than-blatant affection for his long lost brother, but.

But.

Pete looks at him now, huddled and small by the bed, and recalls those stretches in the car. The unremitting retellings; the fragments of Gerard’s childhood. The way the sadness seeped out of him, suddenly replaced by a different thing that Pete could never name, could only identify as the softening of Gerard’s mouth, the relaxation of his shoulders. A different quality to his voice, bespeaking something cherished and—oh.

Oh.

“I can’t,” Gerard continues, quiet. “I can’t, I just—I have to find him.”

Something seizes in Pete’s chest. An echo of empathy.

His brother is _gone_.

Frayed and hoarse, he murmurs, “It’s gonna hurt like hell, Way.”

“You think I care?” Gerard retorts. “You think I give a shit how much it hurts me? I don’t—I _don’t_ —”

His voice breaks and whatever else he means to say gets lost in a wordless noise. A garbled, guttural sound slaved up from somewhere deep within. He hiccoughs, breath catching on the edge of a ragged gasp and the sound of it echoes through Pete, a heavy toll. A pang of guilt.

Gerard hugs his knees to himself and tucks his head down. The sounds of his crying fill the room, wet and muffled, and a heavy sense of anxiety clots and curdles in Pete’s gut. Hand curled tight around the unlit flashlight, he looks away because he can’t stand witness to this. Doesn’t know how. And eventually he backs out the door. Steps back into the dark hallway and clicks the flashlight into life. Makes his way out into the vast church chapel where there is nothing but silence and, now, the distant glint of starlight through the windows.

He doesn’t know how much time passes, how long he sits with some absent congregation, hiding in the darkness before the sound of stumbling footsteps draws him back to himself. He swings the flashlight around and the long bar of light catches on Gerard, walking slowly up the nave, one hand moving over the pews to guide him through the dark. He halts when the light lands on him. Dazzled. Blinking.

“I was worried,” he croaks. His eyes are still red. He walks closer, until he’s standing beside Pete, but he makes no move to sit. “I thought you…”

He trails off, casting a nervous glance out into the darkness.

Pete shrugs. “Well, I’m here.”

Gerard chews his bottom lip and the quiet looms around them. Eventually, Pete expels a heavy breath. Standing, he gestures to the back of the church.

“C’mon.”

The room is just as it was when Pete left. Behind him, Gerard says:

“Pete.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

Pete sighs, suddenly tired. Back to square one, then. He turns to look at Gerard.

“You’re always fucking sorry.”

Gerard’s shivery breath bodes well for nothing. He just shakes his head, a meaningless gesture. Pete steps closer, closer, folds his fingers over Gerard’s hips. Gerard looks at him with the same startled expression that Pete has long-since become familiar with. A tense, frenetic energy—fear and something else. The restrained urge to twist away, maybe, to push Pete back.

“Pete,” he says again and the effort of his speaking hums through Pete’s chest. “I—”

“Don’t.”

A warning or a preemptive strike, Pete isn’t sure. Gerard’s next watery exhale bespeaks the onset of yet another crumbling (another round of tears). A reflexive tightness in Pete’s chest constricts at the thought of bearing witness to Gerard’s suffering more than once in a night. Gerard looks at him with some degree of desperation, but doesn’t push him away. Looks, and hiccoughs on the threat of another brimming sob.

And Pete leans in and swallows up the sound of it in a kiss.

.

As with all other things, Gerard is pliant. A muffled murmuring against Pete’s mouth eventually gives way to something else. An intake of breath, the catch of teeth. They stumble to the bed, tangled in the shedding of their clothes, and Pete pulls Gerard’s hips to his. Chases the heat of Gerard’s body and sinks in to the mindless snap of pain when Gerard’s teeth press into this collarbone.

They find a rhythm, like this. A matching of mouths and groans and thin gasps. A language known only to them and half of it already lost. Gerard never quite looks at Pete.

And in this, Pete tells himself he’s won.

.

As with all other things where Gerard is concerned, Pete doesn’t know why this happens. Later, with Gerard close beside him in the cramped bed, Pete stares up at the shadows on the ceiling and tries to piece their history together. He thinks about Gerard and about his little brother, lost somewhere, dragged along in some chain-gang. To the next auction. To the next owner. He wonders what Gerard will do if he never finds him.

He wonders why he cares.

In the midst of his musing, Gerard’s calloused fingers draw over his collarbone. A twinge of soreness—a misshapen bruise blossoming into life, no doubt.

“I hurt you,” Gerard murmurs.

Pete takes hold of his wrist and gently moves his hand aside. He sits up and crawls off the bed, finding his underwear and his pants in a weird and shapeless tangle on the floor.

“I’ll keep watch,” he says, quiet. “Go to sleep.”


End file.
